The Rise and Fall of China's Bicycle Kingdom: Part 1
[Micromobility PRO] Part 1: From bike graveyards to a billion rides, Beijing’s micromobility story comes full circle, transforming chaos into a system people rely on every day.
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Contents
Introduction
The Bicycle Kingdom
The Shift
Hangzhou’s Quiet Start
The Campus that Started Everything
The Rainbow War
Chart: Shared Bikes in China
What Followed
Introduction
By November 2023, Beijing’s shared bicycles had carried riders on more than 1B trips in a single year. On an average day, 3.12m rides were being taken across the city. The number was a record. It was also, in many ways, the end of a very long and turbulent road.
To understand how a billion rides became routine, we have to go back to a time when China was burying its bicycles.
The Bicycle Kingdom
China’s relationship with the bicycle is older and more complicated than the sharing economy story suggests.
The bicycle arrived in Shanghai in 1868, treated as a curiosity, an expensive Western import that ordinary people could not afford and had little reason to want. That perception held for decades. It was not until 1950 that China produced its first homegrown bicycle brand, Flying Pigeon, launched in Tianjin with government backing. Even then, through the 1950s, owning a bicycle marked you as relatively prosperous. The machines were still beyond the reach of most households.